Researchers at Northwestern University explored whether meditation helps someone become a more compassionate person (Lim et al., 2015). To do this they recruited 56 university students, all of whom reported little to no prior experience with meditation. The students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: regularly completing a meditation session using the web-based application Headspace for three weeks or (as an active control group) completing a web-based cognitive training program from Lumosity for three weeks. To test the subjects on their level of compassion the researchers staged a scenario using three confederates. The subjects would enter a common waiting room where there were three chairs. Two male confederates sat in two of the chairs leaving one for the subject. After the subject was sitting for one minute, a female confederate came in playing the role of a person suffering. She would walk in using crutches with some mild expressions of pain and then would lean against the wall with a sigh of discomfort. The sitting male confederates were trained to ignore her. What did the subjects do? It turned out that 10 of the 27 from the meditation group got up and offered the suffering woman their seat while only 4 of the 29 in the active control group did so.

In this study, the observational units are:

The 56 students that took part in the study.

The 14 students that offered the suffering woman their seat.

Which group, mediation or control, the 56 students were assigned to.

The two males sitting in the chairs along with the female on crutches.